A family of Escape Room Afficionados!

My second visit to Escape Live and my second attempt at an escape room, joining a group of 6 to tackle ‘The Lab’.

I loved the preamble to the story line offered up by the gamemaster before entering. Some small part of me might actually be caring if we didn’t find the solution and ended up wiping out civilisation!

Again, the familiar simplicity of theme and props within Escape Live rooms, where there is not too much to examine before you can get started on finding your first code to a padlock. There are some nice features in this room, that make the puzzles intriguing. But it’s a strange blend of modern tech, and old fashioned mechanical, and you need to ignore that mixed-message so you can just get on with enjoying the puzzles.

This room brought out the competitive nature in group members, rather than teamwork goodwill. Most likely because it felt a little more intense in atmosphere and initially the props don’t give you clear clues as to a sequence to proceed. So, everyone seemed to be searching on their own, looking for that first breakthrough that would initiate the puzzle sequence. So, getting nowhere, I found myself looking around a lot to see what each of the others were doing – and they also were looking around a lot to see what the others were doing! Finally, when the process got underway through someone solving something – I actually couldn’t tell you how it was done.

We failed the room!! By only a few seconds! We found the final code to get out the door and time was up before we could reach the keypad. Destruction was abounding around the globe all because we couldn’t get our teamwork act together. Fail.

The staff at Escape Live are friendly and welcoming, and just as good at making you feel good about a fail as a win.